A Commonplace Book

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

The man who listens to Reason is lost: Reason enslaves all whose minds are not strong enough to master her.

You cannot achieve the impossible without attempting the absurd.

The superfluous is very necessary.

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind, until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised. Bureaus cannot live without a host, being true parasitic organisms. (A cooperative on the other hand can live without the state. That is the road to follow. The building up of independent units to meet the needs of the people who participate in the functioning of the unit. A bureau operates on opposite principle of inventing needs to justify its existence.) Bureaucracy is wrong as a cancer, a turning away from the human evolutionary direction of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous action, to complete parasitism of a virus.

"You see control can never be a means to any practical end.... It can never be a means to anything but more control.... Like junk...."

My parents were both avid readers of nonfiction, pursuing information not just for enlightenment but to feel in control of a world in which they had little say. Their need for certainty was proportional to their sense of doubt. If they had facts -- or what passed for facts -- at their fingertips, they could not only banish uncertainty but also entertain the illusion that they lived in a fixed and static universe, in a world that was passive and predictable and from which mystery was exiled. No wonder poetry was not something my parents found themselves reading for pleasure. It was the enemy. It would only remystify the world for them, cloud certainties with ambiguity, challenge their quest for the sort of security one gets from facts.

Both sexes see an intimate connection between aggression and control, but for women aggression in the failure of self-control, while for men it is the imposing of control over others. Women's aggression emerges from their inability to check the disruptive and frightening forces of their own anger. For men, it is a legitimate means of assuming authority over the disruptive and frightening forces in the world around them.

Libraries have always been about equity; business is about efficiency.

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; -- they are the life, the soul of reading; -- take them out of this book for instance, -- you might as well take the book along with them; ... restore them to the writer; -- he steps forth like a bridegroom, -- bids All hail; brings in variety, and forbids appetite to fail.

Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know.

Take capacity. The standard residential elevator is designed to accommodate 12 passengers, all of whom we assume to be of average weight and form. This is the Occupant's Fallacy. The number 12 does not consider the morbidly obese, or the thin man's convention and necessity of speedy conveyance at the thin man's convention. We conform to objects, we capitulate to them. We need to reverse this order. It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect. Nothing we create works the way it should. The car overheats on the highway, the electric can opener cannot open the can. We must tend to our objects and treat them as newborn babes. Our elevators are weak. They tend to get colds easily, they are forgetful. Our elevators ought to be variable in size and height, retractable altogether, impervious to scratches, self-cleaning, possessing a mouth. The thin man's convention can happen at any time; indeed, they happen all the time...

...it foundered on some familiar foes of ideas too grand for their moments in time: cost, competition and the hyperactive pace of technology.

Mulder: Whatever happened to playing a hunch, Scully? The element of surprise, random acts of unpredictabilty? If we fail to anticipate the unforeseen or expect the unexpected in a universe of infinite possibilites, we may find ourselves at the mercy of anyone or anything that cannot be programmed, categorized or easily referenced. [Pops a sunflower seed into his mouth.] What are we doing up here, Scully? It's hotter than hell.

Anarchism: The name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government - harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being.

Oddly, Microsoft's pitch sounds like that of a government--and not the U.S. government, but the former Soviet government. It's convenient for Microsoft to control the software business. Things will be more efficient if we take care of everything. Consumers benefit from the standardization. Microsoft products work better with other Microsoft products.

If we run everything, the promise goes (whoever is making it), we can make sure that everything is coordinated, that resources are appropriately allocated, that waste and errors are minimized. People won't waste time and resources on diversionary efforts. (But we're seeing another side of the lack of diversity when computer viruses hit: They sweep through almost the entire population.)

In the short run, that's true. In the short term, it is indeed more efficient just to leave everything to Microsoft. But in the long term, some of those wasted resources end up being exciting start-ups that offer new and better solutions.

Both the Internet economy and the market overall depend on competition to flourish. Even waste and errors can lead to better results in the long run. Economist Joseph Schumpeter called it creative destruction.

The heavy-handed pedagogic approach that attempts to fit irrational phenomena into a preconceived rational pattern is anathema to me.

...security, certitude, and peace do not lead to discoveries.